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Guide to Customizing and Integrating Zendesk

January, 2011

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Table of Contents

Introduction........................................................................................................................3

Every Business Is Different............................................................................................3

Customization.....................................................................................................................6

Customized Look and Feel ........................................................................................................ 6 Custom Business Processes ...................................................................................................... 8 Customized Reporting ............................................................................................................ 11

Integration........................................................................................................................ 12

Integrating with the REST API ................................................................................................. 13 Integrating with the Email Interface ....................................................................................... 15

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 15

How To Get Started........................................................................................................ 15

About Zendesk ................................................................................................................ 15


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Introduction If you’re responsible for using or selecting a customer support or help desk system, there are many tradeoffs you’ll face when implementing a solution that best meets your needs. But two things you should not compromise are the ability to customize and integrate your customer support system into how your business works.

This whitepaper describes how Zendesk can be customized and integrated to match the needs of a wide range of businesses. Whether you’re an on-‐line retailer building your first customer support system or a multi-‐national Fortune 500 firm implementing an IT help desk system, Zendesk can meet your needs.

Zendesk is the world’s fastest growing customer support help desk solution. The company provides a web-‐based solution that is used by more than 10,000 companies in approximately 100 countries worldwide. Zendesk is easy to use and easy to get started with. Zendesk enables companies to deliver exceptional customer service and support at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-‐premise or custom-‐built systems. Zendesk is Software-‐as-‐a-‐Service (SaaS) delivered over the Internet, so there’s no software to install, no servers required, no database to set up. And because Zendesk uses a multi-‐channel strategy, you can support customers using the web, email, online chat, social networks, mobile phones, smart phones or however customers want to interact with you.

According to IDC, small and medium businesses are embracing cloud-‐based applications that run over the Internet without requiring purchase of hardware or installation of on-‐premise software. Chief among the advantages cited by IDC include the affordability and flexibility since there’s no big up-‐front licensing fees.

Every Business Is Different While every business is different, successful companies have one thing in common: they have many satisfied customers! And no matter how successful a business you have, there’s always a need to provide better customer service. For many of the most successful businesses, great customer service has become the distinguishing characteristic that has helped them carve out a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.

But every business is different, with different types of customers, products, policies and procedures. And growing businesses are always changing: adding new products, entering new markets and developing new ways of interacting with customers, whether over the web, social networks or mobile devices.

“Software that is accessed through the cloud is often free or pay-‐per-‐use—a more affordable model than paying big, upfront licensing fees. Half of small firms that use ‘the cloud’ say it has improved their bottom line, according to a survey this fall by Microsoft Corp., which provides cloud services.”

– SMALL COMPANIES LOOK TO CLOUD FOR SAVINGS IN 2011, WALL STREET JOURNAL DEC 29, 2010


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Figure 1 – Support Agent View of Zendesk Interface

Table 1 – Zendesk Channels

Zendesk enables you to support customers over a variety of channels and platforms including:

Web Email Online Chat Twitter iPhone iPad Android BlackBerry

So how can you ensure that a customer support system will meet the needs of your business today and in the future? It’s important that the system you select can be customized and integrated into your business the way you want it to be done. You also want to make sure that the solution is easy to use and can scale to keep up as your business expands.

Many organizations adopt Zendesk as a departmental solution in one area and then expand its use more broadly in the organization. Zendesk is used by organizations across a broad range of segments including eCommerce, Retail, Technology, Travel & Hospitality, Media & Publishing, Telecommunications, Financial Services, Professional Services, Government, Education, Healthcare and more.


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Table 2 – Featured Zendesk Customers

Adobe Adventist HealhthCare Amber Alert ANZ Royal Bank Autodesk Bed Bath & Beyond Blue State Digital Booksamillion Booz Allen Hamilton BrightStar Healthcare CALE Parking Cambridge University Press CBS Interactive Chicago Symphony Orchestra Coldwell Banker Columbia University Condé Nast Publications Cubic Telecom Denver Broncos FileMaker Inc Fox International Channels Griffin Technology Groupon

Harvard Business Publishing HomeAway Hulu HTC IDEO Intuit Jamie Oliver JCDecaux John Lewis Johnson & Johnson Kaplan Virtual Education Kiva Kobo LG Electronics Live Person Lonely Planet Microsoft MSNBC National Geographic Society NBC Universal New Zealand Post Nielsen NPR

O’Reilly Media OpenTable Oxford University Press Qatar Airways Rackspace Retail Solutions Rogers Communications San Francisco Examiner SAP Scribd Sears Canada SmugMug Sony Music Standard & Poors Thomson Reuters Tumblr UBC UCLA Vignette Corp Xerox Yale Zappos Insights and thousands more

Zendesk is used by companies that are renowned for delivering excellent customer service including: Adobe, Jamie Oliver, SmugMug, Rackspace, Zappos Insights and more. Zendesk also includes some of the fastest growing companies like Groupon, Kobo, and Tumblr among its customers. These companies have continued to rely on Zendesk to serve their needs as the business has expanded to serve global markets with hundreds of customer support agents relying on Zendesk daily. With Zendesk’s powerful customization and integration features, we make it easy to deliver great customer service as your business grows.


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Customization Even though you can be up and running in just minutes with Zendesk, it’s also easy to customize so that it fits in with your existing web site and business processes. In fact, customers can interact with your business through web, email, online chat, mobile phones and social networks without even knowing that you’re running Zendesk. All they’ll know is that they’re getting great service.

Customized Look and Feel By default, Zendesk lets you easily set up a web page that works as a portal for your customers to get self-‐service information about common issues, workarounds or frequently asked questions. They can also request support directly from the portal ensuring that any incident that is reported, whether over email, web, online chat or other channel is recorded and tracked. Because Zendesk provides multiple channels of support, you can ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

You can easily customize the look and feel of your customer support portal by changing the color settings, adding your logo, customizing the support domain name, support email addresses, HTML email template and by selecting local languages. These settings can be adjusted by selecting the Personalize Your Zendesk option from the Account Menu within the Zendesk web application without any programming.

Figure 2 – Zendesk Personalization Settings

Advanced users and web developers can also define Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for complete control over the support portal’s design if you should so chose.

“Zendesk is excellent web-‐based customer support software that our team uses daily. It’s our central point of communication between end users and support personnel, and because it’s so customizable, we can handle all requests and needs in an organized manner. The triggers and targets have let us automate a lot of redundant jobs and save time.”

–TOAN LE APPLICATION SUPPORT TECHNICIAN, SEARS CANADA


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You can override standard CSS settings using the Zendesk CSS Global Widget. For example, you can change the background color, header and margin as follows:

Figure 3 – Modifying Your Zendesk CSS settings

Here’s an example of a fully customized interface using CSS:

Figure 4 – Customized Zendesk Support Portal

body { background-color:#CC9933; } #header { height:150px; background-image: url('http://mattlatmatt.com/shared/totw-header-export.png'); background-position:top left; background-repeat:no-repeat; background-color:#CC9933; } #page { /* removes the white margin */ padding-left: 0px; padding-right:0px; } #table_header { /* hides the previous logo */ visibility:hidden; } div#container { /* adds margin back below header */ padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; }


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While most users are comfortable customizing Zendesk’s settings, we also maintain a list of certified partners who are experienced customizing and integrating Zendesk.

Customized Business Processes Customizing a customer support help desk system entails more than just the look and feel. You can also implement your own custom business processes for dealing with customers, responding to requests, escalation, routing and so on. Zendesk is designed to be completely operational as soon as you sign up for the free trial. It also includes three facilities for implementing your own business processes through triggers, automations and macros.

Triggers enable you to define tasks to run automatically whenever a certain condition, or triggering event, occurs. For example, Zendesk includes a helpful trigger that automatically notifies the user of any public comments that have been updated to a support ticket. This keeps your customers aware of any progress on their issue without requiring extra work on their part or on the part of the support agent. By default, customers are only notified of public comments, not of internal or private comments between support agents. You can easily customize any of the default triggers and create new ones that match your business needs.

Figure 5 – Editing Zendesk Triggers

Automations are like triggers, but instead of executing based on the fields of support incidents, they are executed based on time. For example, Zendesk includes an automation that automatically closes resolved issues after four days of inactivity. This eliminates the needs for agents to wait to hear back from customers before moving on to other work.

“Zendesk’s triggers are ideal for helping a small staff communicate effectively with users. With Zendesk, every time the trouble ticket system is updated, the user receives a status update by email and they know we haven’t forgotten about them.”

– CATHY MCCANN HELP DESK SUPERVISOR, UCLA DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY


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But perhaps in your business you want to have a shorter or longer period before closing incidents. Or maybe you don’t want to close incidents until a senior manager has reviewed them. You can customize any of the default automations or create your own.

You can capture just about any business process using Zendesk’s triggers and automations. They’re easy to set up from within the Zendesk application without requiring any custom programming. All you need to do is select the fields you want to examine and specify what type of action to take. For example, you may have a frequent support question regarding lost passwords. You can easily create a trigger that searches incoming tickets for particular phrases and automatically sends an appropriate response, perhaps with a link to generate a new password.

Figure 6 – Defining a Custom Trigger within Zendesk

Macros offer another powerful facility for customization. Macros enable you to establish consistent responses that can be sent to customers. For example, let’s suppose customers often contact you via your support email address when they have a billing question. You can automatically respond to such inquiries with a custom trigger that looks for certain keywords in the email. And you can then have an automated message be sent (sometimes called a “canned response”) that is defined in a macro.

But just because the response is automated, doesn’t mean it can’t be personalized. Zendesk enables you to take advantage of pre-‐defined placeholder fields so that you can add custom elements to any response. There are placeholders to fill in the name of the customer, the company name, the date and time of the inquiry, the name of

“I was spending 10 hours per day answering support emails, doing lots of copying and pasting to provide the same answers again and again. Thanks to these macros, that time immediately dropped to four hours per day. I can reply to commonly received questions with one click.”

– CHRIS KENNEDY PLATFORM MANAGER, CUBIC TELECOM


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the agent responding and so on. You can easily create a macro that provides a personalized response, for example when assigning an open ticket to development, as shown below.

Figure 7 – Defining a Macro Using Placeholders

Table 3 -‐ Zendesk Placeholder Fields

{{current_user.name}}

{{current_user.first_name}}

{{current_user.email}}

{{current_user.organization.name}}

{{current_user.external_id}}

{{current_user.phone}}

{{ticket.title}}

{{ticket.description}}

{{ticket.url}}

{{ticket.id}}

{{ticket.status}}

{{ticket.priority}}

{{ticket.ticket_type}}

{{ticket.index}}

{{ticket.group}}

{{ticket.due_date}}

{{ticket.latest_comment_formatted}}

{{ticket.latest_public_comment_formatted}}

{{ticket.all_comments_formatted}}

{{ticket.all_public_comments_formatted}}

{{ticket.account}}

{{ticket.assignee.name}}

{{ticket.assignee.first_name}}

{{ticket.assignee.last_name}}

{{ticket.requester.name}}

{{ticket.requester.first_name}}

{{ticket.requester.last_name}}

{{ticket.organization.name}}

{{ticket.current_collaborators}}

{{ticket.ticket_field_ID}}

{{requester.name}}

{{requester.first_name}}

{{requester.email}}

{{requester.organization}}

{{requester.external_id}}

{{requester.phone}}

{{user.name}}

{{user.first_name}}

{{user.email}}

{{user.organization}}

{{user.external_id}}

{{user.phone}}


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Together, triggers, automations, macros and placeholders enable you to further customize Zendesk to implement your organization’s best practices automatically. That way you enable your customer support agents to deliver better service, faster.

Customized Reporting Zendesk includes built-‐in reporting and graphs so that you can see exactly how your support organization is performing. These reports let you see trends or patterns that may be important to your business, such as how many tickets are being created each month, how quickly issues are being resolved and so on.

You can easily create your own custom reports and graphs to highlight whatever data is important to you. You can set conditions to define what types of tickets you want to view (created, resolved, unsolved, etc.) and set filter for specific attribute (priority, ticket type, group, etc.)

Figure 8 – Standard Zendesk Report Showing Resolution Times by Group

In addition, you can export your data in CSV or XML format for further analysis in applications such as Excel, Crystal Reports, Business Objects and so on. You can schedule CSV exports of all tickets or updated tickets on a daily basis.

“Zendesk makes a world of difference. It lets our cloud customers see the current status of their tickets, which increases their overall confidence in us. It also feeds us performance reports on how promptly we’re responding to their support needs.”

– DAMIAN GREEN PRODUCT OPERATIONS ENGINEER, RACKSPACE


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Integration For most organizations, Zendesk becomes their system of record for tracking and responding to customer inquiries. As its usage grows, Zendesk is often integrated with other systems, whether they are internet-‐based systems running “in the cloud” or on-‐premise software applications run by the IT department or elsewhere in the business.

Zendesk includes “out of the box” integration with the most popular web-‐based applications including: Atlassian Jira, GoodData, Google Analytics, NetSuite, Salesforce.com and more than 60 others. That’s more integration than any other help desk system available. And because of its open architecture, it’s easy to integrate Zendesk with virtually any application you’re using.

Table 4 – Featured Zendesk Integrations

These integrations extend the power of Zendesk tremendously. For example, if you’re using Salesforce.com Customer Relationship Management (CRM), you have immediate “two-‐way” integration between Zendesk and Salesforce. This means that your sales reps can see any open support incidents from within their Salesforce application in real-‐time without having to switch screens or login to a new system.

Salesforce users that are also Zendesk agents can update and create Zendesk tickets directly from within Salesforce.com. Similarly, your customer support agents can see important details about a customer or prospect all from with the Zendesk application. You can specify exactly how information should be mapped between Salesforce.com and Zendesk to exactly match your needs. The result is that it’s easier than ever to deliver exceptional service to your best customers without having anything fall through the cracks.


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Figure 9 – Mapping Fields Between Zendesk and Salesforce.com

Integrating with the REST API Zendesk provides an open API (Application Program Interface) that enables web developers to create plug-‐ins to integrate with almost any web-‐based application. Zendesk includes a REST API, a Remote Authentication interface, a Javascript Resource API for building Zendesk widgets to integrate external data into your help desk interface, as well as an interface for integrating via email.

The REST API (Representational State Transfer) is implemented as plain XML or JSON over HTTP using all four standard REST commands: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE. Every resource in Zendesk, including Tickets, Users and Tags has their own URL and can be manipulated in isolation.

The REST API can be called from any programming language including Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Visual Basic, etc.

Figure 10 – Example Javascript Code Using JSON to Integrate with Zendesk REST API

<script> new Ajax.Request('/users.json', { method:'get', asynchronous: true, onSuccess: function(transport){ var obj = transport.responseText.evalJSON(); $('active-views').innerHTML = '<p>' + obj.length + ' users in your help desk.' + ' First user is ' + obj[0].name + '</p>' } }); </script>


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Zendesk’s open API also enables you to integrate JavaScript resources using any of the standard Zendesk text placeholders to include information about the selected objects, such as the ticket description, priority, the name of the assignee or requester, and so on. These can be referred to using the standard curly brace notation demonstrated previously with macros.

Table 5 – Zendesk Placeholder Fields

{{ticket.description}} Ticket description

{{ticket.priority}} Ticket priority

{{ticket.assignee.name}} Ticket assignee full name (if any)

{{ticket.requester.name}} Ticket requester full name

{{ticket.organization.name}} Ticket requester organization

You can also create Zendesk widgets using Javascript that integrate with external data sources. This enables you to pull data from other applications into Zendesk or vice versa. For example, you can create custom widget that enables support agents to track their time spent on a ticket and record that information into a third party web application such as Harvest.

Figure 11 – Sample Widget Code

Figure 12 – Initializing the API Resource Object

A more thorough discussion of integration using the JavaScript Resource API along with the complete source code is available at the Zendesk site at:

http://www.zendesk.com/api/javascript-‐resource-‐api

<div id="harvest-time-tracking" domain="yourharvestaccountname.harvestapp.com" use_ssl="true"> <h3 id="title"></h3> <div id="content"></div> </div> <script src="/javascripts/push/harvest.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

harvest_resource = new Zendesk.Resource( {title: 'Harvest time tracking', anchor: 'harvest-time-tracking', domain: $('harvest-timetracking').readAttribute('domain'), use_ssl: $('harvest-timetracking').readAttribute('use_ssl') || 'false', enable_resource_cache: true, login_content: login, application_content: application, application_resources: [ {resource: 'daily', on_success: projects_selector} ] } );


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Integrating with the Email Interface You can also integrate with Zendesk from any standard email system using the email interface. This enables a support agent to respond to tickets, set properties or add comments when working with tickets via email.

The way you do this is to include the id of the ticket in the email subject header along with any placeholder properties you wish to set. For example, by including #12345 {{assignee:Joe priority:high}} in the subject header, you can assign ticket 12345 to Joe with high priority. You can set the ticket status, ticket type, requester, group, tags or public/private settings via the email interface.

Conclusion Zendesk is an easy to use yet powerful customer support help desk. It was designed from the ground up to be completely customizable and integrated into other web-‐based or on-‐premise applications in order to provide a seamless experience to your customers. By using Zendesk, you’ll be able to spend less time and money on implementation and better focus your efforts on deliver great service to your customers.

This whitepaper has given just a few examples of how you can customize and integrate Zendesk into your own business environment. With more than 5,000 customers, Zendesk has proven itself to be a flexible system in helping organizations improve their level of customer service.

How To Get Started Visit us to sign up for a free 30-‐day trial with full access to all features at www.zendesk.com/signup. Contact Zendesk to get started at +1 (415) 418-‐7506 or email [email protected].

About Zendesk Zendesk is the proven cloud-based help desk software that is the fastest way to enable great customer service in rapidly growing companies. Zendesk is so easy to use, it's loved by support teams and their customers worldwide. More than 10,000 organizations including Adobe, MSNBC, Sony, and Groupon, trust Zendesk with their most valuable asset: their customers. Now, organizations can deliver exceptional support across the web, email, and social media. Founded in 2007, Zendesk is funded by Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.

“First, we designed an architecture based on a positive customer experience. We then used Zendesk’s APIs to integrate ticket management into the process. Our Zendesk rollout was like nothing I’d ever seen. Word spread quickly that our trial team was having a great experience with Zendesk. I actually had people demanding that they be brought onto Zendesk ahead of schedule.”

– STEVE MCINNES ASSOCIATE PRODUCT MANAGER, LONELY PLANET

ZENDESK, INC. • 989 MARKET ST. #300 • SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94102 Toll Free 1 888 670 4887 • [email protected]

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